Public Opinion - The public as goal setter

The lack of compelling evidence for direct popular influence in diplomatic
interaction does not necessarily make American foreign policy
undemocratic. On the contrary, theorists see the public as sovereign,
because it establishes parameters for action and sets goals for presidents
and their agents. Broad national policy is said to originate with the
people. For example, during the Cold War, the public's foreign
policy mandate was clear. It included the desires to defend U.S. interests
around the world against the onslaughts of communism and anti-Americanism,
to refrain from direct involvement in unnecessary wars, and to engage in
diplomatic conduct becoming to a great democratic power. Theoretically,
such a mandate was implemented by policymakers who developed shorter-term
tactical programs. This widely accepted view is not without its logical
and evidential flaws.

In the first place, because of their preeminent roles in the
opinion-making process, presidents generally define the relationship of
the United States to international events. Consequently, they can make
almost any of their actions appear to defend the national interest and to
be within the bounds of decorous democratic foreign policy. Further, the
limits that the public ostensibly sets for them are remarkably flexible.
They can be expanded because of the exigencies of a changing international
climate that, according to the policymaker, demand new approaches. In
early 1946, for example, Americans looked forward to a long period of
normalcy and nonentanglement. Apparently, joining the United Nations was
all the internationalism they desired. At the time, few would have
approved of the permanent stationing of military units in Europe, nor
would they have accepted giving away millions of dollars to foreign
friends. By 1948, however, the impact of events—events interpreted
by the foreign policy establishment—convinced a majority of
citizens that unprecedented interventionist activities were needed to
maintain national security. The limits that restrained American diplomats
in 1946 were expanded by 1948 through a combination of events and
propaganda.

The view is also inadequate when analyzed from the bottom up. The abstract
differentiation between the public's task of defining strategic
interests and the government's task of developing tactical policies
is difficult to make operational. During the early 1960s most Americans
supported their government's general attempt to stop
"communism" in Southeast Asia. Yet, the bombing of North
Vietnam, putatively a tactical policy decision implemented to achieve that
goal, became a matter for widespread public debate. Both hawks and doves
refused to leave the bombing issue to the planners in the Pentagon. And
rightly so, for most major military policies are fraught with serious
political implications.

In sum, despite widespread scholarly agreement about its basic outlines,
the dominant paradigm delineating the public's role is faulty. The
suggestion that the public sets goals and limits while the president
executes policy does not adequately describe the opinion-policy
relationship in American diplomatic history.

The public and the policymaker do interact in a more fundamental way.
Historic periods are marked by unique climates of opinion. From time to
time, Americans have been more isolationist than expansionist, more
tolerant than intolerant, or more pessimistic than optimistic. Such
general moods, which develop as a result of a concatenation of social,
economic, and, to some degree, psychological factors, cannot be rapidly
changed through elite manipulation.

Those who challenge the notion that national mood is impervious to sudden
transformation point to the Spanish-American War and the manner in which
the yellow press supposedly created mass interventionist hysteria.
Interestingly, many of the explosive elements present during the crisis of
1895–1898 were also present during the Cuban Revolution of
1868–1878. However, the earlier stories of atrocities, gun running,
assaults on American honor, and the struggle for Cuban freedom did not
arouse a population recovering from its tragic and bloody Civil War.
During the 1890s, a different generation of Americans was receptive to the
inflammatory accounts in the newspapers of William Randolph Hearst and
Joseph Pulitzer. The "psychic crisis" of the Gilded Age
produced an audience primed for jingoist journalists and politicians.

Similarly, Richard Nixon, the architect of détente with the
People's Republic of China in 1972, could not have proposed such a
démarche in 1956. According to most indicators of public opinion,
American citizens then would not have been willing to consider such a
drastic reorientation of national policy. No one could have been elected
to a position of power in 1956 who talked openly about sitting down with
Mao Zedong, the "aggressor" in the Korean War. Five years
later, President John F. Kennedy, a Democrat from the party that
"lost" China in 1949, believed it impossible to alter U.S.
policy in Asia. A majority of Americans would first have to unlearn the
propaganda lessons of the early 1950s before such a dramatic program could
be safely broached by a national leader.

In the years after the Vietnam War, the American public was in no mood to
intervene in other distant struggles in the Third World. It is possible
that had the public not felt so strongly about this issue, Ronald Reagan
would have intervened with U.S. troops in El Salvador in 1981. And while
Americans had apparently licked their so-called Vietnam syndrome by 1991,
when George H. W. Bush led the nation into war in the Persian Gulf, Bush
was convinced he had to terminate the war before marching on Baghdad
because he feared his constituents would not support a longer war or more
GI casualties. Bush's chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General
Colin Powell, supported that decision with what came to be called the
Powell Doctrine. The United States could not again participate in a
lengthy, Vietnam-style war unless the public expressed enthusiasm about
such a venture at the outset.